Transportation options

Of course, we could just spend all of our transportation dollars building and expanding roads, as Dino Rossi and Tim Eyman would have us do, or we could actually give commuters more options… you know, before steadily rising gasoline prices takes our only option away.

We need much more mass transit, but we need to do it in an intelligent manner. It doesn’t make sense to build light rail in Seattle if it costs 6 to 8 times as much as in other cities. It doesn’t make sense to pay for hyper-costly public transportation schemes by taxing those least able to afford it — the poor, low income workers, and senior citizens on fixed incomes. We should tax the shit out of gasoline and use the money for more busses. It may make sense to revisit the monorail idea. The monorail died for lack of funding, yet even at its worst, it cost far less than light rail. It’s cheaper to build up than dig. We will still need roads and cars because not everyone can use public transportation. But there are things we can do right now that don’t require pouring any concrete and won’t cost drivers or taxpayers a dime. For example, the checker in my neighborhood grocery store told me that he just traded his car because he commutes to Seattle from Marysville. This grocery chain — I won’t name it — is notorious for assigning workers to stores far from their homes. This is just plain stupid. Employers with multiple locations should be encouraged to assign workers near where they live to reduce commuting. Maybe coerced, if they won’t do it voluntarily. That is sheer waste, and we are now living in times when wasteful behavior is antisocial behavior.

@1 Like a lot of other things around here, it may have to wait for tax reform. It’s time we stopped dithering and tackled tax reform because the current regressive tax system is taking a lot of other things down with it.

“It doesn’t make sense to build light rail in Seattle if it costs 6 to 8 times as much as in other cities.”

And just why is that, anyway? It’s not all that hard to dig holes here, being as there’s no bedrock. There’s the matter of Lake Washington, but this certainly isn’t the only city with water to be crossed. We also have lots of largely unused rail right-of-way that we seem intent upon turning into playgrounds for a few bicyclists.

Seems the barriers to getting the job the hell done are more political than physical.

Yay Sight Line, They’re good folks. Since this looks to be a KC transportation discussion I’ll keep my nose out of that. But, I did want to give Goldy a shout out for surfing around over at Sight Line.

@12 You’re clearly one of the lunatic fascist fringe element. Say, are you guys going back to blowing up government buildings, day care centers and all, once Obama becomes President? It’s probably more your speed.

Ah back to the usual right wing bullshit. Tell me again righties how it is you can justify fighting abortion with all your might, then saying fuck the little bastards if they need health care. . . not my problem.

Here’s the reason transportation issues get voted down in Washington. The right wingers are racists. They know that minorities rely on public transit more than any other group so they vote against it, even if it works against them too. That’s how much they hate anyone who ain’t white.

No, we are just against spending 12 billion dollars on a state of the art light rail system to shuttle hoodrats from the valley to downtown, in order that they may “chill” at 3rd and Pike. There’s already the route 42 and 7 for that.

Wake the fuck up, you Sound Transit cheerleading koolaid drinkers! The light rail line is not designed to get ONE SINGLE PERSON OUT OF THEIR CAR!

I don’t really believe that. But I do believe the line is a waste. I actually am for light rail, but only if it makes sense. The Seatac to Downtown line doesn’t. It’s a political line, nothing more. It solves nothing.

@2: Sorry Roger – it doesn’t cost anymore to build light rail here than in Portland. Portland has just as many hills and bridges and their light rail is working great. Quit making the same arguments – making the same mistakes over and over is what Einstein identified as …ral stupidity. and that is what wwe have had in the seattle region – real stupidity on transit and rails.

The Seattle area is vastly different geographically than the Portland area. The last ice age gave very deep lakes, which are difficult to span with traditional bridges. Our soils are soft making them difficult to tunnel through.

Add to that the limited land mass of Seattle bordered by the Sound to the west, Lake Washington to the east and the Ship Canal to the north your rail routes are limited.

Then consider the expense of purchasing property in Seattle verses Portland, especially since the best routes go through Seattle’s toniest neighborhoods.

@18 The Downtown to Sea-Tac line provides a way to get to the airport without driving there. You take a bus (or other mass transit option) to the downtown core, and from there the light rail line (Phase 1) takes you to the airport. This will make it possible for people living almost anywhere in Seattle and its north and south suburbs to get to the airport without driving, and vice versa.

the soils here are sloppy and wet and you have to build the tunnel structure as you go so the whole thing doesn’t collapse

it is a total lie to say light rail here costs the same as in portland

the guy who said we have rail right of way but aren’t using it is right most other cities use an unused rail right of way

here we are picking up the huge cost of a subway underground tunnels but then running it at grade for about four miles — worst of both worlds — about 57 street crossings makes you go slower and limiting train length

all the cost of subway

none of the benefits

what major city has its major regional train system at grade with street crossings and short little trains?

@21 The reality of sitting in traffic, nudging a vehicle, is what a lot of people have to experience in their daily commute. As you accelerate from a complete stop you get the worse gas mileage imaginable. Do that three hundred times during a two hour drive in backed-up traffic, and somebody’s burning a lot of gas. Some mornings and evenings there are a hundred thousand vehicles going nowhere. And while some people are happy to tell others to get out of their cars and have been doing so for a long time, some people aren’t too please to have half-assed social engineers fucking with their lives. Know what I mean? And who’s to say that the future won’t include green, clean, energy efficient single occupancy vehicles? Freedom of the road is an American freedom. Or does the left want to deny some individual freedoms for some undefined, unstated greater good? Please don’t tell me the left hates ’57 Chevys.

@23 Please understand that the downtown to SeaTac line is fucked up. As in really fucked up. This isn’t a left or right issue. It’s a “What a fucked up line” issue. Who the fuck in their right mind would want to meander through Rainier Valley to get to SeaTac? Good fucking grief.

You want rail and to play social engineer with other peoples lives, I want 15 lanes of superhighway going in any direction I care to go, and I’d tax poor people, as well rail and bus riders to pay for it. But I reckon that if you’re willing to compromise, then perhaps I would be too.

According to Wikipedia, “Seattle’s new light rail system is by far the most expensive in the U.S. at $179 million per mile …. Over the U.S. as a whole, excluding Seattle, new light rail construction costs average about $35 million per mile.” Phase 2 will cost even more, with the 5-mile segment from the U. District to Northgate costing $500 million per mile.

Portland’s light rail costs are much lower. According to a website called “North American Light Rail Information and News Site” (which you can reach by clicking on footnote 20 in Wikipedia’s light rail article), the costs for Portland’s light rail system are:

Eastside MAX, completed 1986, $14.2 million per mile

Westside MAX, completed 1998, $53.5 million per mile

Red Line, completed 2001, $22.7 million per mile

Yellow Line, completed 2004, $62.5 million per mile

So, even Portland’s most expensive segment costs only about a third of Seattle’s Phase 1, calculated on a per-mile basis.

@26 If you think I want light rail, you haven’t been reading this blog.

So what’s your idea of compromise? Raising gas taxes to pay for roads? You rightwing fucks aren’t even willing to pay gas taxes to keep the ones we have from collapsing or sinking. How are you going to pay for your 15 lanes of superhighways? Got any bright ideas, Jack?

Compromise? No, I don’t compromise with rightwing assholes. Why should I? They don’t. No, we’ll hold an election, and if our side wins, we’re going to shove our policies up your asses, same as you did to us.

@28 Can’t build our way out of congestion? Have you been over the Narrows recently? The congestion is gone. Cars move freely, burning less gas, quality of life is improved for thousands of people. There are still serious bottlenecks elsewhere in our freeway system- let’s address those somehow.

My bad about you and light rail. I see now in an earlier post that you took exception to the cost of rail.

The late Elmer E. van Ness, a leader in retaining Seattle’s electrified trolley system back in the 1960’s, a who’s who type in public transportation of the time, was a dear friend of mine. I still agree with the view he held. For this region, for public transportation, electric trolleys are still the way to go.

I ride my bike over the new Narrows bridge on a pretty regular bases. Sweet bike lane on that thing.

There are still bottle necks at every major intersection in Gig Harbor during the evening commute, how you gonna make those suckers bigger? The west bound Purdy turn off from Hwy 16 backs up a mile up highway 16 on a pretty regular basis. Are you going to fill in Henderson Bay and make Hwy 302 a 4 lane highway?

@32 Regarding the bottlenecks in Gig Harbor – If you’re headed towards Tacoma, those bottlenecks combined with the old situation at the Narrows made for nightmare commute. But the problems in Gig Harbor would have been no excuse to do nothing about the Narrows. Similarly, it might take over an hour to go five blocks east on Olive Way at 5:00PM just to get on the southbound freeway for a two-hour drive to go only twenty miles. Do we ignore the I-5 problem because the Olive way or Mercer Street problems exists? I believe we should fix whatever traffic bottlenecks that can be fixed, providing the most bang for the buck. The Narrows is a darned good example of this.

Actually, it sounds like we’re trying to make the same point. I shouldn’t have used the term bottle neck in my post @32. The Narrows Bridge was a bottle neck the other stuff I described is an over capacity system.

Portland has a festering problem with MAX that will only get worse if they don’t fix it as gas prices go up, but it will cost more than if they had fixed the problem when MAX first got started. Few tunnels, and they only build them where geography dictates, and that tunnel is not even in Downtown, but west of it. THey need a tunnel in Downtown Portland, it would even drop some operating costs. A 4 car MAX train could do the work of 2 of the two car trains they currently operate. Each train requires a driver.

Also, one thing that is not mentioned often, is how long TriMet’s railcars last. Even though the Low-Floor cars that came along just 10 years after the first MAX trains went into service made the high-floor ones in Portland functionally-obsolete, the FTA rules said Portland has to keep them for 25 years. That 25 year period is almost up, but Portland is keeping the Type-1s(as they call them), with a rebuild that will make them good as new, and run for another 20 years. The Type 1s just cannot operate without a Type 2 or Type 3 car, or the new Type 4. If they did not rebuild the Type 1s, they would have just made a bigger order with the Type 4, which is based on what Houston uses.

In Dallas, they ordered there LRVs just as the ADA rules were taking effect, but rather than have to put a lift in each car, trackside lifts(which Portland used at first on the Banfield line but discontinued starting with the Type 2s), or raise the platforms, they took a different path, and it was a simple idea, something European Rail operators had done, and that was add a low-floor center section to an older High-Floor tram that still had some useful life.

As for Electric Trolleybuses, Metro missed out on a chance to joint order with Vancouver. Vancouver, now the only city in Canada that apparently thinks they are the way to go(Edmonton just voted to phase out their small fleet by 2010). Metro had joint ordered for trolleybuses before, Philadelphia in 1978. Philadelphia was going to scrap those buses without replacement, but just went for modern Low-Floor Trolleybuses.

Meant to add something about Portland’s latest rail line due to go on-line later this year. It is a commuter rail line, but will not be pulling into Portland Union Station, it is a suburb to suburb line, from Wilsonville to Beaverton. TriMet and Washington County wanted to use a new(to North America, it had been operating in Europe for awhile) Diesel Light Rail technology on the route, so it would be able to share the existing MAX line tracks once it got to Beaverton, but Short-Line operator Portland and Western could not get it’s customers to agree on shifting freight traffic to non-transit operation hours. So they settled on a heavy DMU that met FRA rules, the Colorado Railcar Aero DMU. This is the modern version of the old Budd RDC. The first of the cars just arrived this week.

Vehicles similar to this have been proposed for the Eastside Line. I often have suggested it be used on SOUNDER-North back when it looked like SOUNDER-North was not doing good on ridership.

There is an upstart commuter rail operator that I would like to see Sound Transit emulate, but it might not be possible. Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City. They just opened Front Runner-NORTH, an all day commuter train running on a third track built within the right of way of Union Pacific RR. Having their own track allowos them to run more frequent trains, about every 15 minutes Peak, every 30-60 minutes off-peak. The UTA uses Locomotive-hauled Rolling stock on Front-Runner, instead of DMUs(probably would have been better to buy DMUs), but the Locomotives are sourced locally, like in Boise, Idaho at MotivePower Industries.(Formerly Morrison-Knudsen Rail). FrontRunner is now at 5900 passengers a day, and growing. They did not expect that much until later this year.

As for UTA’s other rail service, the TRAX Light Rail Network, they took out a little hedge on vehicle supply. They only need 77 new LRVs for the next 4 extensions they have planned, but they decided to take out some options, about 180 of them. Which could possibly be sold to other transit operators, or exercised if need be by the UTA if ridership goes up.

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